New CBO Report Crushes Obama’s Economic Policies

February 28, 2014 By Matthew Burke

The number-crunchers at the bipartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) are raining more bad news on the Obama economic agenda and the Obama regime as a whole, stating that the nation’s economic recovery is worse that the recovery after the nation’s last four recessions.

The new CBO report, perhaps more damaging to the regime, states that whatever decline there has been in the unemployment number, has been largely fueled by the decline in the labor participation rate.

The report also says that the number of people out of work for more than six consecutive months, remains extraordinarily high (emphasis added):

The deep recession that began in December 2007, when the economy began to contract, and ended in June 2009, when the economy began to expand again, has had a lasting effect on the labor market. More than four and a half years after the end of the recession, employment has risen sluggishly—much more slowly than it grew, on average, during the four previous recoveries that lasted more than one year. At the same time, the unemployment rate has fallen only partway back to its prerecession level (as shown in yesterday’s blog post), and a significant part of that improvement is attributable to a decline in labor force participation that has occurred as an unusually large number of people have stopped looking for work (see the figure below). Moreover, the rate of long-term unemployment—the percentage of the labor force that has been out of work for more than 26 consecutive weeks—remains extraordinarily high.

The new CBO report on the economy falls on the heels of other recent reports by the agency that have been damaging to the Obama regime this month, including a report claiming that Obama’s minimum wage hike would cost as least 500,000 jobs, and that Obamacare would cost the equivalent of 2.3 million jobs. Additionally, just week, an ex-CBO Chief said that Obamacare subsidies caused a disincentive for people to work.
Democrats immediately circled the wagons, making the outrageous and embarrassing claim that the job losses created by Obama’s policies would give people more freedom from a new term they invented called “job lock.”